Overview

This is the first edited volume to focus explicitly on the asiento, the contractual framework that regulated the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish America between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. As the mechanism that structured a vast system of human trafficking – one of the foundational tragedies of the modern world – the asiento functioned as a legal, political, and commercial instrument of empire. Drawing on new archival research in multiple languages and from repositories across the Atlantic, the chapters trace the negotiated nature of these contracts, the transimperial flows they enabled, and the roles played by formal and informal agents of diverse social, ethnic, and institutional backgrounds. Contributors are: Pedro Cardim, Christopher Ebert, Manuel F. Fernández Chaves, Alejandro García Montón, Miguel Geraldes Rodrigues, Manuel Herrero Sánchez, Wim Klooster, Thiago Krause, Maximiliano Mac Menz, Joseph Mainberger, Ramona Negrón, Linda Newson, Jonatán Orozco Cruz, Edgar Pereira, William Pettigrew, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Klaus Weber, and David Wheat.

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Manuel Herrero Sánchez is Professor of Early Modern History at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville. His research focuses on the comparative approach to the history of the Dutch Republic and Genoa, and on the Spanish Monarchy considered as a polycentric imperial structure composed of urban republics. Jonatán Orozco Cruz is Predoctoral Researcher at Pablo de Olavide University, where he is developing his PhD dissertation Transnational Social Networks Connecting Imperial Spaces: the Spanish Monarchy and the Slave Asiento (1675–1694) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Manuel Herrero Sánchez. Pedro Cardim is Associate Professor of History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He has published widely on Iberian history, early modern legal history, and Portuguese colonisation of Brazil.

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